The FBI has identified 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks as a suspect involved in the failed assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania yesterday. After the incident, there was a rush to identify any online accounts that could be linked to the alleged shooter and could explain his motivations. Discord now says My city that an account was found on a gaming chat platform that was most likely associated with Crooks, but that he rarely used it.
“We have identified an account that appears to be associated with the suspect; it was rarely used, and we have found no evidence that it was used to plan this incident or discuss his political views,” a company spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement. “Discord strongly condemns violence of any kind, including political violence, and we will continue to work closely with law enforcement.”
Primarily used for gaming communities and online chatting, Discord is different from public social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. In contrast, Discord is a server-based messaging system where users congregate in isolated communities that are not easily searchable or shareable beyond the lively members of individual servers, especially if people apply a private server to communicate.
This was the case with the shooter behind the 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo that left 10 people dead. The planning for the attack took place in a private Discord server for months before its implementationat which time the platform was also used to share links to live streams of the massacre on Twitch. Both platforms were criticized at the time by the New York Attorney General and others for insufficiently monitoring exchanges for potential threats.
While Discord promoted itself as a more mainstream communication tool for broader apply during the pandemic, it has since doubled down on its roots as a gamer-centric platform. “We believe Discord can play a uniquely important role in the future of gaming,” CEO Jason Citron said he wrote in a blog post earlier this year. “We’re going to focus on making it easier and more enjoyable for people to talk and meet before, during, and after games — and we’re going to help the creators of these games bring their creativity to life.
The July 13 shooting at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, left the 2024 Republican presidential candidate with a gunshot wound to his right ear and killed an attendee in the stands and the suspected shooter. Two other attendees were injured and remain in critical condition at Alleghany General Hospital.
Interception reported that Crooks made a $15 donation to the liberal PAC ActBlue in 2021 on President Biden’s inauguration day, but voter registration records showed registered as a republican after turning 18 later that year. He was wearing a T-shirt from YouTuber DemolitionRanch, a gun enthusiast, during the shooting. “Last night was crazy…” said the channel’s creator, Matt Carriker, I tweeted today“News stations are calling me and asking if I ever spoke to the shooter…what the…fuck.”
